Read Those Who Save Us Online

Authors: Jenna Blum

Tags: #Historical - General, #War stories, #World War, #German American women, #Holocaust, #Underground movements, #Bildungsromans, #1939-1945, #Fiction, #Literary, #Sagas, #Germany, #Jewish (1939-1945), #Historical, #War & Military, #Young women, #1939-1945 - Underground movements, #General, #Germany - History - 1933-1945, #1939-1945 - Germany, #Fiction - Historical

Those Who Save Us (8 page)

BOOK: Those Who Save Us
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9

AFTER THIS VISIT, TRUDY IS TOO WEARY TO FACE THE three-hour drive back to Minneapolis, with its attendant dangers of black ice and starving deer who wander onto the roadway. Besides, Trudy has more business in New Heidelburg; better to get it over with all at once instead of making another trip. Since the town offers nothing in the way of accommodation—it isn’t exactly a tourist attraction—she spends the night in one of the cheap motels on the outskirts of Rochester, in an overheated room that smells of smoke and dirty hair. She sleeps restlessly and rises early, and after a complimentary breakfast consisting of a roll and coffee so weak Trudy can see the bottom of the cup through the liquid, she returns to New Heidelburg, where she stops first at the nursing home to arrange for Anna’s room there. A single, of course; if Anna, that most private of women, were forced to endure a roommate on top of everything else, Trudy thinks, she would break her toothbrush glass and quietly eat the pieces.

This unhappy but necessary task accomplished, Trudy proceeds to the next: dropping by the town’s real estate office to list the farmhouse for sale and its contents for auction. This transaction too is concluded with surprising ease, although the realtor wears on her sweater a Santa Claus pin with demonic, flashing red eyes, which both fascinates Trudy and stirs in her a vague anxiety.

She finds herself back out on the street much earlier than expected, and since she has no reason to linger, she again takes her leave of the town, this time with a bewildering sense of anticlimax. Trudy frowns, puzzled. She should be relieved, even pleased; she will reach the university campus well before her office hours and afternoon seminar. Which is good, since after receiving the call about Anna yesterday she absconded from both without so much as a note for the History Department secretary. But as Trudy passes the Chat’N’Chew, the Starlite Supper Club, the Holgars’ dairy farm, the nagging feeling that she has forgotten something intensifies. The Lutheran cemetery where Jack lies buried on the ridge comes into view; is it that she has neglected to pay her respects to him? Trudy slows but then notices a plastic Santa head the size of a pumpkin impaled on the pointed iron gates. Trudy shudders, turns up the heat on the dash, and drives on.

When she sees the double rows of pines that lead to the farmhouse, she realizes what has been troubling her. It is not, she tells herself, that she is being sentimental; it would be a gesture of kindness to personally retrieve Anna’s belongings and bring them to the Good Samaritan Center, instead of having the social worker do it. And although insurance and county appraisers will be sent to the property to estimate its value, it is only practical that Trudy assess the fire damage firsthand. She pulls into the drive beneath the trees, wrestling with the steering wheel as the tires of her Civic whine for purchase in the snow. Eventually she reaches the dooryard, parks, and gets out. Then she stands examining her childhood home.

Since Jack’s death three years ago, Trudy has made a point of coming here four or five times a year—on Christmas, Easter, Anna’s birthday, Mother’s Day—enough to satisfy her own requirements for daughterly obligation. But on these occasions, her need to escape Anna’s silence and return to normal life, as urgent as the pressure exerted by an unrelieved bladder, has prevented Trudy from really looking at the house. Now, as with Anna, Trudy is startled by how much and how quickly the farmhouse has decayed. It is still standing, but just barely. The paint is blistered, the foundation sinking, the roof an accident waiting to happen. The developers to whom it will probably be sold will either bulldoze the house to make room for more arable land or let it fall down by itself; to judge from outside appearances, they won’t have a long wait. It is a shame, really, as the property has been in Jack’s family for three generations. But it can’t be helped. Trudy certainly is not going to live here, and she can’t afford to maintain it.

Sorry, she mutters as she navigates the rotting steps to the porch.

Inside, there are further signs of Anna’s demise in the housekeeping tasks she could no longer handle. The carpet of which she was so proud is stained and curling in the corners, the wallpaper bubbled with water stains. Trudy ventures into the kitchen and winces at the black tongues of soot around the stove. Glass crunches underfoot, and an icy current of air rattles the industrial-strength blue plastic over the window. Some member of the New Heidelburg Fire Department has smashed it with an ax. An overly dramatic gesture, Trudy thinks. Why not just try the door? The farmhouse, like most in the area, has always been left unlocked.

Upstairs, she finds her parents’ bedroom unscathed, though dusty and cold. Trudy has not been in here since after Jack’s funeral, and she looks sadly at the lopsided bed and battered dresser. Even the view from the window is homely and unpre-possessing: the south field, the barn, a square of blank sky. So why is it that sometimes, while standing in line at the supermarket or in the midst of giving a lecture, Trudy catches herself thinking of just this scene? It rises before her uninvited and hangs there, superimposed between her mind’s eye and what she actually sees.

But she is wasting time. From the closet Trudy unearths a scuffed hard-edged suitcase, a relic from the fifties, and begins filling it with Anna’s clothes. Cardigans, pumps, dresses, skirts. Anna has never once in her life worn slacks, no matter how brutal the temperature. Trudy turns next to the bureau, taking from it costume jewelry and pantyhose, gloves with the pricetags still attached, a pair of slippers wrapped in crackling cellophane. When Trudy reaches the bottom drawer where the undesirables are kept, she selects the least worn of Anna’s cotton nightgowns. Then she pauses, arrested by some distant bell of memory. Has Anna kept it? Is it still there?

Trudy chews her lip. She should close the drawer again. Best to let sleeping dogs lie. She leans forward and yanks the drawer out as far as it will go, ignoring the protesting shriek of old wood.

She digs through the sleepwear and darned underpants and pushes aside, in one corner, a decades-old sanitary belt, and there, at the very rear of the drawer, she finds what she is looking for: a single wool sock. She lifts it out and unrolls it with trembling hands and shakes the hard object within into her lap. Then she sits on the cold floor and stares at this sole souvenir of her mother’s wartime life.

It is a gold rectangle about the size and shape of a ladies’ cigarette case, and indeed, at first glance, it might be mistaken as such. The back is smooth metal, the front etched with a horizontal band of zigzagging silver lines in an art deco pattern. In the middle of this is a circle of diamonds—two or three of them missing now, leaving tiny pocked holes—and in the center of this is a silver swastika.

To somebody of Trudy’s historical knowledge, this might seem an incongruous gift, since during the Reich German women were discouraged, even forbidden, to smoke. But to Trudy it is not strange, since the case is not intended for cigarettes at all. She pries open the catch at its side to reveal, framed in balding maroon velvet, an oval black-and-white photograph. Of a young Anna, seated. With the toddler Trudy on her lap, wearing a dirndl, her hair in looped braids. And behind Anna, one hand possessively on her shoulder, an SS officer in full uniform. His head is raised in an attitude of pride, his peaked cap tilted forward so that his features cannot be seen.

How many times as a girl, as an adolescent, has Trudy done exactly this, while Anna was hanging laundry in the dooryard or busy at the stove or helping Jack with the livestock? Peering at the photograph, trying to tease the details from its background. There aren’t many. The folding canvas chair in which Anna and Trudy sit. The curving bulk of the staff car at the officer’s back, a dot that might be the Mercedes emblem on its hood. Behind his head, tiny waving lines the size of lashes: the fronds of the willows in the Park an der Ilm, where Trudy knows this picture was taken. Or does she? Does this photograph truly confirm her earliest memories? Or has she merely looked at it so often that she only thinks she remembers? Images substituting for reality.

Trudy wipes her eyes on her sleeve. They are watering and her nose is clogged, facts she decides to blame on the cold.

She gets up, her knees popping like gunshots, and takes the photograph over to the window. She tilts the case this way and that, an action she performed countless times in her youth, as if by doing so she could shake off the officer’s hat and finally, finally see her father’s face.

But since of course she cannot, other memories obligingly come in its stead.

Where is he, Mama? Why
isn’t
he here with us? I miss
him—
Be quiet, Trudie! Do you want Jack to hear you? Now I will tell
you something very important. You must never say such things in this
house. You must never speak of that man at all. You must never even
think of him. Never. Do you understand?

But I
don’t
want Jack. I want
him

Her mother’s strong fingers, digging into the soft flesh on either side of Trudy’s childish chin.

I said you will not speak of him. He no longer exists. He belongs
to the past, to that other place and time, and all of that is dead. Do you
hear? The past is dead, and better it remain so.

And this conversation, held in the barn where Jack spent most of his time:

Daddy, I have a question.

Sure, Strudel. What is it?

Promise you
won’t
get mad?

Why would I get mad?

Because
it’s
kind of a bad question.

I could never be mad at you, Strudel. Ask away.

Daddy, did you know my real father?

I
don’t
know what you mean, honey.

Yes you do. My real father. From Germany. Did you ever meet
him?

Well, Strudel,
you’re
right,
that’s
not a nice question. It hurts my
feelings.
I’m
your dad.

I know,
but—
And
that’s
all there is to say about that.

Okay,
but—
And you
shouldn’t
talk about these things, Strudel. Not to anybody.
But especially not around your mother. You know how it upsets
her.

And so on and so forth. A conspiracy of silence, a wall that Trudy could neither penetrate nor scale. She has often wondered whether Anna and Jack conferred as to what they would say when faced with such queries or if they made their responses independently and instinctively. Not that it really matters. The denials are confirmation enough. And the photograph, the solid evidence. Of course Jack, despite his stumbling, kindhearted evasions, is not Trudy’s father. No, her real father, though perhaps now as dead as her adopted one, is still with her. He is Trudy’s blond hair, her love of organization, her penchant for chess and classical music and all the other tastes to which Jack and Anna never subscribed. Sometimes Trudy thinks she can smell him on her, the personal scents of the man coming from her own pores: fresh barbering, boot polish, the sauerkraut and venison he had for lunch.

What Trudy doesn’t know is the nature of Anna’s relationship with him.

Was she the officer’s mistress? His wife?

If either, did she enter into the contract willingly? Did she care about him, even love him? Trudy can’t quite bring herself to believe this. The very thought turns her stomach cold and closes her throat. But why else would Anna have kept this picture—and her silent counsel—all these years?

Trudy holds the image up to the light and squints at her young mother. Anna’s expression gives nothing away. It is calm, perhaps a bit grave. Does this signify a secret satisfaction at having secured such a powerful partner? Could Anna really be so morally bankrupt as to have solicited the liaison with the officer, enjoyed it, relished it? Could there be, behind that beautiful face, a void?

Or perhaps Anna’s expression conceals resigned acceptance. Or horror. Or is an external portrait of the internal deadening, the numbness, that accompanies repeated abuse. Trudy has read dozens of case studies of women who undertook desperate measures in times of war, in order to survive. Maybe the officer forced Anna. Maybe she had no choice. But if this is so, and Anna is a victim of circumstance, why has she chosen never to explain this to her daughter?

The past is dead. The past is dead, and better it remain so.

Trudy gazes at the photograph a minute longer, then shakes her head and decisively snaps the case closed. Enough is enough. There is nothing to be gained by once again asking painful questions to which there are no ready answers. Whatever Anna has done, Trudy has made her own life, and it is high time that she return to it. She has afternoon classes to teach.

Moving from the window, she sets the little gold case on the dresser and finishes packing Anna’s things. A favorite brooch, an afghan, hairbrushes. Trudy snaps the latches shut and takes a last look around; she will not be seeing this place again. She hefts the suitcase and leaves.

She is halfway down the stairs when she suddenly turns, runs back up, and seizes the gold case. She slips it into her coat pocket. Then she hurries from the bedroom, this time for good, her breath coming and going in ghosts.

10

ALTHOUGH SLEET SLICKS THE ROADS ON THE WAY BACK TO the Twin Cities, Trudy manages to arrive on the university campus a few minutes before her scheduled office hours. This is a relief; Trudy hates being late, the way rushing from place to place frays her composure, leaves her sweating and disheveled with her socks falling down inside her boots. She is also grateful to see that no students are lying in wait for her. When Trudy is her best self, she likes talking to them—in fact, she delights in any sign of their intellectual effort, no matter how small. But the past twenty-four hours have been trying, and Trudy knows that were her pupils to seek her out now, she would be impatient with their ever-ringing cell phones, their fidgeting embarrassment at being in such close proximity to her; their improbable, grammatically incorrect, unpleasantly intimate excuses as to why they haven’t turned their assignments in on time.

Today, Trudy thinks, with any luck, the weather or the demands of their mysteriously busy lives will prevent them from coming to see her. She needs the hour to shift gears from her personal persona to her professorial one. She helps herself to a cup of coffee from the History Department hot plate and hangs her damp coat, then assumes her usual post at her desk and pulls a pile of midterms onto the blotter. With an air of diligence, Trudy uncaps her red pen.

The
Mother’s
Cross,
the top paper is entitled,
An Examination of German Women as Breed-Horses of the Third Reich.
Trudy sighs and flips open the oaktag folder to the first page:

It has been argued and indeed perported by historians of the
time period under discussion, that is to say the Third Reich,
that during this time period the German woman was viewed by
the Nazi Government as a Baby-Machine, that is to say she
was valued for her fertilization abilities above all. A particku-lar
Award was awarded to German women that produced
three, six or nine Purebloded children, bronze silver and gold
respecktively, and from this an implication can be drawn that
the real station the German woman occupied during this time
period was the stable. She was merely a Breed-Mare or Horse.

Trudy refrains from scribbling,
Do you have the slightest idea what you’re talking about?
in the margin and instead writes SPELLCHECK so vehemently that her pen rips the paper. Then she closes the folder and pushes it aside. Perhaps she is not in quite the right mood for grading after all. She tilts her chair back and stares at the far wall, where the room’s only decoration hangs: an archival photograph, enlarged to poster size, of American soldiers marching German civilians to Buchenwald a few days after the camp’s liberation, where they will be made to bury the dead. The afternoon is gray and gloomy—not unlike the one beyond Trudy’s window right now—and the Amis are in army-issue slickers, their prisoners in patched wool coats. Toward the rear of the column, clinging to an invisible hand, is a small towheaded girl who could be the identical twin of Trudy at that age. She might in fact be Trudy herself.

Trudy is gazing at the poster without really seeing it when she hears the dreaded knock on the door. She tousles her hair, which from the feel of it is drying in stiff unattractive spikes, like whipped egg whites.

Come in, she calls, and arranges her features into what she hopes is a welcoming expression.

But it is not a student who enters; it is Dr. Ruth Liebowitz, Director of Holocaust Studies, from down the hall.

Have I caught you at a bad time, Dr. Swenson? she asks.

No, not at all. Why?

Ruth laughs. Your face, that constipated look you get when you’re trying to seem helpful. You must be expecting a student.

Trudy pulls a mock scowl.

I was, yes, but mercifully nobody’s shown up. Come on in, I still have—Trudy checks her watch—another twenty minutes. How are you?

Ruth drops into the chair on the other side of Trudy’s desk and tucks her feet beneath her, catlike. Trudy watches her fondly. People meeting Ruth for the first time often mistake her for one of her own undergrads. Her small freckled face, her nimbus of frizzy hair, her uniform of sweater and rumpled khakis seem more appropriate to a freshman than somebody in Ruth’s important position. And Ruth deliberately fosters this impression, using what she calls
my disguise
to her advantage whenever pos-sible: on the first day of class, she sits among her students to hear what they say about her. In actuality, she is only nine years younger than Trudy.

I’m fine, Ruth says now. More to the point, how are
you
?

A little tired, but— What. Why are you giving me that look?

Ruth narrows her dark eyes.

Come on, kid. You skipped out on your classes yesterday. You weren’t home last night. What’s going on?

How do you know I wasn’t home?

I called, says Ruth. Several times, actually.

Several times? What did you think, that I was dead on the floor?

Ruth glances away.

So I was a little worried, she mumbles defiantly.

Trudy hides a smile. Knowing that Trudy lives alone, Ruth is sometimes a bit overprotective, but it is also comforting to know that if Trudy were indeed dead on the floor, she wouldn’t have to lie there for days before being found.

What if I had been entertaining a gentleman caller? Trudy asks.

Ruth looks delighted. Were you?

No, Trudy admits. She sinks back in her chair and rubs her eyes. I had to go to New Heidelburg. There was a situation with my mother.

Ruth’s gaze sharpens further.

This is the difficult mother? The one I so rarely hear about?

Of course it’s her. How many mothers do you think I have?

Ruth flaps an impatient hand. What happened?

She had a little accident.

What kind of accident?

Honestly, Ruth, what are you, the Gestapo?

Ruth maintains an unwavering stare. The historically impossible friendship between the two women, the unlikely alliance between a professor of German history and the head of Holocaust Studies, requires black humor, a way of acknowledging and thus defusing possible tensions. But neither has ever applied it to the other personally.

Sorry, says Trudy. I’m not quite myself today... My mother’s all right, it was nothing serious, but it’s obvious she can’t live by herself anymore. So I had to arrange to put her in a nursing home.

Ruth screws up her face in sympathy.

That’s rough, she agrees. I know how it is. When we put my aunt in a home, she didn’t speak to us for six months.

My mother hasn’t spoken to me in fifty years, Trudy says, and laughs.

Again Ruth gives her a penetrating look, but she lets the subject drop.

Well, kid, she says, unfolding herself from the chair, if you want to talk about it, I’m here...Oh! I almost forgot the other reason I came in here.

What’s that?

Ruth braces her palms on Trudy’s desk and sways forward.

We got it, she says dramatically.

Got what? Trudy asks.

Ruth gives the blotter an emphatic slap.

For the love of God, woman, wake up! The funding for the Remembrance Project.

Oh, says Trudy. Oh, good for you. How much did you get?

Ruth rolls her eyes. Not as much as I’d hoped for, naturally. But enough to contact area survivors, to hire interviewers and videographers. I can cut corners by having one of my doctoral students encode the tapes for the archives. And if all goes well, next year I can ask for more money—the sky’s the limit.

That’s fantastic, says Trudy. Congratulations—This is such a feather in our cap. This’ll put our program on the map in terms of recording Holocaust testimony, put us right up there with fucking Yale. And not even fucking Yale has survivor interviews on camera.

I know, says Trudy. You must be so proud.

I am, I have to admit, Ruth says, grinning. Her teeth are tiny and pearly and crooked; like baby teeth, Trudy thinks,
milk teeth,
Anna would call them. This Project is my baby . . .But sometimes I think, what am I, nuts? There’s so much work to be done—Well worth it, Trudy assures her. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.

Ruth settles a pert khaki-clad hindquarter on the corner of Trudy’s desk, wrinkling the term papers.

Actually . . . , she says.

Oh, God, groans Trudy. I was just being polite, Ruth!

I thought you might want to try out, Ruth says.

Try out?

For an interviewer’s position.

Me?

Yes, you.

Trudy shakes her head.

I don’t understand, she says. Why would you want me? The Holocaust isn’t my field of expertise.

Ruth waves this objection aside.

We have to get this off the ground quickly, she says, and we need historians who really know their stuff to be interviewers, and that means you. I think you’d be a natural. And you’d really be doing me a favor.

Trapped, Trudy swivels to the window and looks out. The quadrangle is deserted, the sleet being whipped sideways by a relentless wind, the Gothic red sandstone buildings gloomier than usual in the premature dusk. Her reflection hovers among them, transparent and watchful, a streetlamp in its throat.

It wouldn’t matter that I’m not Jewish? she asks.

Well, of course you should be, since we are the Chosen People, Ruth says tartly. But no, it wouldn’t matter.

Huh, says Trudy.

Then she swings back around, reaching over to tug the papers from beneath Ruth’s behind and stuff them into her briefcase.

I can’t, she says. I’m sorry, Ruth. I’m truly flattered you asked. But I have such a full courseload this semester, as you know, and now there’s this situation with my mother on top of everything else . . .

She feels herself flushing. Anna’s transfer to the Good Samaritan Center having already been arranged, there is nothing much left for Trudy to do except make a weekend visit to ensure that she’s settled in. And this won’t take much time. But Ruth doesn’t need to know this.

And, as Trudy has expected, she buys the excuse.

Forgive me, she says, hopping off Trudy’s desk. I forgot. But maybe, when things settle down with her...Will you at least think about it?

Of course, Trudy lies.

Ruth goes to the door.

Good, she says. Because I’m going to keep after you.

She cocks a thumb and forefinger at Trudy in imitation of shooting a gun. You know where to find me if you change your mind, she adds, and leaves.

Congratulations again, Trudy calls to Ruth’s departing footsteps in the hall. They are rapid. Ruth does everything quickly.

Trudy smiles, then glances at her watch. She swears and leaps from her chair, tugs her still-damp boots on, and grabs her briefcase. Yanking the door open, she nearly collides with the student who is standing on the other side of it, head hanging.

Professor Swenson? the girl mumbles to the carpet between her feet. Can I talk to you a minute? I’m so so so so sorry I missed class yesterday, I had this really really really bad urinary tract infection . . .

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